By Debbie Gardner
Sometimes, new careers pop up in the most unexpected ways. Such was the case for murder-mystery author K.B. [Kathleen] Pellegrino. The prolific Springfield-based writer – her sixth novel, “Killing the Venerable: It’s Their Time,” publishes this month – was just looking for a little distraction when she signed up for a writing class at the Springfield Museums a few short years ago.
“I had retired from Livingstone [where she was a licensed construction supervisor overseeing historic building rehabs for 13 years]…and I thought I would be happy, and in a month I wasn’t,” Pellegrino told Prime in an early December interview, adding she was 80 pages into novel number seven at the time. “So I thought I would take a writing course.”
A ‘fruitful’ decision
Pellegrino said her background in teaching – she spent 20 years as the chair of the Department of Economics and Management at Westfield State University – and the proposals and reports that went with Livingstone’s historic rehab work had kept her writing for years, but it was always of the technical or the academic type. She signed up for the Museum course to explore a different kind of writing.
At first she was disappointed.
“When I started the course, I thought it was boring,” Pellegrino admitted. “Nobody was interested in the kind of writing I was, they all wanted to write about their histories.”
But Pellegrino stuck it out and during the fourth class, the instructor, Jan Sadler, introduced an exercise designed to try and push her would-be writers to get more creative. It was an exercise that changed everything for Pellegrino
“She brought in a bowl of fruit and handed me an orange,” Pellegrino recalled. “I had deja-vu that I was back in third grade and I had to write about the characteristics of that orange.”
That’s when she said the “bad angel sitting on my shoulder” whispered in her ear.
“I decided to write about being sexually attracted to the orange – an ‘Ode to an Orange’ – forgetting that I had to read [my finished work] out loud,” Pellegrino shared.
She put off reading her work in class as long as possible, but eventually had to take her turn.
“I could see some of the women in the class being embarrassed” as she relayed her “ode,” Pellegrino said. Her instructor, however, applauded.
“She said, ‘That is what I want to see, creativity, looking at things differently. This is wonderful, can I take it home?’” Pellegrino continued, adding she still has a copy of her “Ode to an Orange.”
“It doesn’t seem so bad to me now,” she said.
Pellegrino finished the 12 classes with Sandler that semester, and looked forward to the “writing exercise” Sandler offered for the class to pursue over the summer.
“She gave us a list of words [to choose from] and I picked one that meant somebody who likes to murder somebody. It’s not a common word, I couldn’t find it in the dictionary,”
Pellegrino said. But it did become the catalyst for a new career.
“Over the summer, I began writing my first book, “Sunnyside Road: Paradise Disassembling,” she said. “I grew up in Eastern Mass. on a street called Sunnyside Road. Growing up, I thought ‘nothing bad can happen on a street called Sunnyside Road,’ so I decided to set my book on [a place called] Sunnyside Road with big McMansions, and how it was not as nice as it seems.”
Rough draft completed, Pellegrino called the Museums the following class season to reconnect with Sandler and take another writing class “only to be told Sandler had passed away.”
“It affected me. She certainly made her mark on me,” Pellegrino shared.
“One of the best things you can do in a classroom for any student is validation,” the former college professor explained. “I would say Jan Sandler validated me. I didn’t consider myself a writer – I was a business writer – she validated me [as a creative writer].”
And her "summer prompt” ultimately launched Pellegrino on her “next act” as a murder-mystery writer.
Murder is her medium
When asked why she chose murder mystery as her genre, Pellegrino said she’s been a fan of the novels since her youth, influenced in part by the books her father brought home from business trips.
“He would travel a lot, entertaining clients in New York or Los Angeles. At 9 p.m. he would get bored and go to his hotel room and read [murder] mystery novels,” Pellegrino said, adding that he always “came home with a suitcase full.
“I would steal all his novels to read,” she continued. “From the time I was a little girl, from about the age of eight I was reading murder mysteries – with things I shouldn’t have been reading in them – but I wanted to know who would kill the sexy blond by putting a knife in her heart.”
All told, Pellegrino figures she – and a sister who also loved the murder mysteries her dad would bring home – have read close to 2,000 books in that genre.
“She reads all those things, but she doesn’t want to write,” Pellegrino said, adding that as an author, she looks at murder mystery writing as a way to explore subjects that might make people uncomfortable if covered in another medium.
One such subject is what drives the actions of sociopaths and psychopaths: she’s done extensive research into the psychology behind these personality types, and how the environment these personalities live and grow up in may influence their behavior.
“I weave [sociopaths and psychopaths] in and out of my novels and nobody knows I’m doing that,” she explained.
She’s also explored broader themes including how friends react when one of them is suspected of murder, how murder in a neighborhood affects its residents, and how suffering abuse during childhood can affect the adult personality in her murder-mystery series to date.
“When you are exploring in a murder book, nobody thinks you are preaching to them, but I do want to make people aware of issues,” Pellegrino explained. For example, in the novel she was working on when Prime contacted her, Pellegrino said she was exploring the issues of elder abuse and loneliness through the lens of the murder of elderly women.
“I don’t think the world is interested in elderly people except to do something nice for them occasionally,” she observed.
She sets her books in Western Mass. – most are based in a fictional town called WestSide – that “sounds a lot like West Springfield,” but isn’t. Pellegrino said she chose to set her books close to home because “Western Mass. has been under appreciated as a setting” for novels.
She also uses experience serving on the Springfield Police Commission for three years in developing plots and the characters – including Captain Rudy Beauregard – in the special crimes unit that investigate her murders.
Her husband, Joe, was a judge in Springfield’s family court, and she has drawn on some of his knowledge in developing her books as well.
Learning the ropes
Pellegrino noted that during the initial editing of “Sunnyside Road” – she used LifeRich Publishing, a trademark of Reader’s Digest, to get that book and her next two novels into print – her editor asked why she hadn’t made her protagonist, Captain Beauregard a woman. Her answer was simple, and based on experience. “Because there were very few women police captains, and she would have to be in her 50s,” Pellegrino explained.
It’s not the first editorial decision she’s made by instinct.
“I can say that plotting wakes me up in the middle of the night,” Pellegrino admitted. “I wake up at 3 a.m. and I will say ‘No, that’s not working, you are going in the wrong direction.’ It’s like there is something in my brain that corrects me – it’s happened many times.”
And she admitted ‘who did it’ in her whodunnits is not always clear from the beginning – even to her.
“I can say in three of my books I did not know who the murder was going to be until two-thirds of the way through,” Pellegrino shared. “My husband wanted to know if I chose the murder [in those books] because after awhile I didn’t like them; but I didn’t.”
She recently received industry validation of her prowess as a murder mystery writer. Her second book “Mary Lou, Oh What Did She Do?” was selected for the 2020 American Fiction Award. Pellegrino said she was “shocked” when she received the news, and asked the marketing person who assists her with her website if the award was for real.
“Mary Lou I liked,” Pellegrino admitted. “I wondered, if I didn’t have the good home life I did, would I have been like Mary Lou?”
As prolific a writer as Pellegrino has become – her first book was published just two years ago in 2018 – she said going from writing a book as a summer assignment to seeing her work in print on Amazon and in Barnes & Noble, as well as on Kindle and in audiobooks – was not initially easy.
“Mystery/Thriller fiction is not among the largest sellers,” Pellegrino said, adding that she quickly discovered the traditional publishing route, which involves getting an agent to promote your book to publishers, was “unavailable unless you were famous or writing in a unique field.”
She chose the route that offered her the most guidance for her first novel “Sunnyside Road - Paradise Dissembling” – an expensive but walk-you-through-the-process Vanity Press printing by a LifeRich Publishing – and stayed with them for her next two novels, “Mary Lou, Oh What Did She Do,” and “Brothers From Another Mother: All for One, Always?” Her subsequent novels – “Him, Me and Pauline: Drugs Murder and Undercover,” “A Predatory Cabal: Worm in the Apple,” the book coming out this month, “Killing the Venerable: It’s Their Time” and the one she was working on at the time of the interview – all publish under her own Indie publishing company, “livres-ici, a trademark of WMASS OPM, LLC.”
And there will probably be more books to come.
“I’m passionately involved in why people do terrible things to other people,” Pellegrino said. “Most of what I’m interested in is why someone feels they have the right to take someone’s life, and why when murder takes place in your neighborhood, how it affects you.
“If you write murder fiction, it’s a safe place to explore society,” Pellegrino continued. “When you read about murder in the newspapers, it’s just horrible. When you read about it in a mystery, it’s not so bad.”
Overall, Pellegrino said, “I write for me. I really enjoy writing, and now I have the time.”
K.B. Pellegrino’s books are available on Amazon, at Barnes & Noble, at Boswell’s Books in Shelburne Falls, Porter Square Books in Cambridge, MA, as downloads for Kindle, and on her website, https://kbpellegrino.com
